Iphone 4 Event

Apple has made a couple of adjustments to its iAd mobile advertising platform for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, including significantly lowering the buy-in price to $100,000 -- down from $500,000, which was already down from $1,000,000 -- and to increasing developer revenue sharing to 70 percent -- up from 60 precent.

Steve Jobs reported today that Apple had sold 50 million iPhones and 35 million iPod touch for a grand total of 85 million iPhone OS devices on the market (okay, 85,450,000 including the iPad).

Jobs said this was a great target for developers. He's right. No matter how many complaints there are about iPhone OS and Apple's stewardship thereof, that's a tremendous install base of devices that can pretty much all run the same OS (give or take a few features here or there) and same apps.

iPhone 4.0 beta 1 is now available to developers via http://developer.apple.com/ and it doesn't just bring the 7 "tent-pole" features announced so far for consumers, it brings 1500 new APIs to developers including some we've been waiting for for a long time:

While Apple announced 7 tent-pole features for iPhone 4.0 including multitasking, folders, mail enhancements, iBooks, Enterprise features, Game Center social network, and iAd mobile advertising platform, it's important to remember we won't get the final feature set for iPhone 4.0 until Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) this June.

Last year Apple showed off a lot of features for iPhone 3.0 in March, but it wasn't until WWDC that we saw features specific to the new iPhone 3GS hardware -- video recording, VoiceOver, compass, Voice Memo app, etc.

Apple has announced iPhone 4.0, available for developers in beta form starting today and arriving for iPhone and iPod touch users sometime this summer, and iPad users in the fall. Highlights of the latest version of the mobile OS that powers the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad include the following 7 "tentpoles":

Steve Jobs thinks current mobile advertising sucks and Apple's answer for iPhone OS 4 is iAd, an HTML5 platform that gives developers a 60% cut of revenue and provides... what basically looks like ads as apps.